Phase stable swept-source optical coherence tomography with active mode-locking laser for contrast enhancements of retinal angiography

Swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) is an attractive high-speed imaging technique for retinal angiography. However, conventional swept lasers vary the cavity length of the laser mechanically to tune the output wavelength. This causes sweep-timing jitter and hence low phase stability in OCT angiography. Here, we improve an earlier phase-stabilized, akinetic, SS-OCT angiography (OCTA) method by introducing coherent averaging. We develop an active mode-locking (AML) laser as a high phase-stable akinetic swept source for the OCTA system. The phase stability of the improved system was analyzed, and the effects of coherent averaging were validated using a retina phantom. The effectiveness of the coherent averaging method was further confirmed by comparing coherently and conventionally averaged en face images of human retinal vasculature for their contrast-to-noise ratio, signal-to-noise ratio, and vasculature connectivity. The contrast-to-noise ratio was approximately 1.3 times larger when applying the coherent averaging method in the human retinal experiment. Our coherent averaging method with the high phase-stability AML laser source for OCTA provides a valuable tool for studying healthy and diseased retinas.

ON VARIATIONS OF HUMAN HEMODYNAMIC PARAMETERS CAUSED BY NEGATIVE PRESSURE BREATHING DURING 15-HOUR HEAD-DOWN TILT

The cardiovascular reaction to negative pressure breathing (NPB) was studied in human subjects in the condition of 15-hour head-down tilt (-15°). Amplitude and time characteristics of tidal oscillations of physiological parameters synchronous to free and NPB breathing were measured after 14 hours in HDT. Oscillations of cardiovascular parameters were determined using the coherent averaging technique. A multiple increase in amplitude was stated during transition from free breathing to NPB, whereas variations of the other characteristics of oscillations were little affected.

An Instantaneous Correlation Coefficient and Simplified Coherent Averaging Method for Single-Channel Foetal ECG Extraction

In this paper, an instantaneous correlation coefficient and simplified coherent averaging method for single-channel foetal ECG (FECG) extraction is proposed. The instantaneous correlation coefficient is used to determine the position of the R peak of the measured ECG signal, and the simplified coherent averaging method is used to extract the main information of the ECG signal. The loss of the nonlinear and nonstationary characteristics by coherent averaging is recovered by threshold processing of the residual signal. The FECG signal extraction is performed in three steps. In the first step, the main information of the maternal electrocardiogram (MECG) is extracted from the abdomen electrocardiogram (AECG) signal by means of the instantaneous correlation coefficient and simplified coherent averaging method, and then the noisy FECG is obtained by subtracting the MECG obtained by simplified coherent averaging from the AECG. The second step is to extract the main information of the FECG by applying the instantaneous correlation coefficient and simplified coherent averaging method to the noisy FECG. The remaining signal is obtained by subtracting the simplified coherent averaging FECG from the noisy FECG. Thirdly, the threshold method is utilised to remove MECG residual noise and random gross value noise from the remaining signal to extract the nonlinear and nonstationary information, and the final FECG extraction is obtained by adding the nonlinear and nonstationary information to the simplified coherent averaging FECG. The validity of the proposed method is verified by experiments using synthetic data and real database data. FECG extracted by the method has the advantages of clear QRS complex wave, reasonable enhancement of P wave and T wave morphology, and no loss of nonlinear and nonstationary characteristics.